About Trebuchets

About Trebuchets

Below are Responces I have made to articles I have found about Trebuchets at the bottom of this page there is a link toMy Research page where I have conducted book research and Original research.

Trebuchet
What is a trebuchet? I did some research on it and I found an article by Paul Schmidt. Paul Schmidt is or was a teacher of industrial controls and microprocessors at the college level. He also is an engineer. He is a much credited person. I found his article “WarSerpent” trebuchet construction article. Although it mostly talks about how to make a trebuchet model, it gave really good information on what a trebuchet is, where it came from and how to make one.
The article explained that a trebuchet (pronounced tray-boo-shay) is a machine capable of hurling objects over a considerable distance relative to its size. The Europeans got the idea from china and brought it to France. It is operated by gravity. A trebuchet is like a catapult only it uses gravity rather than coiled rope. The first time I saw a trebuchet was on Northern Exposure.
How does it work? The trebuchet swings a projectile in a pouch with two strings both are attached to a lever arm with a counterweight on the other en and is thrown in a trajectory to gain momentum then one of the strings are let go and the projectile is thrown.
I am interested in engineering and the things that are made by them. At JEMS summer workshop, that I went to last summer, we engineered a trebuchet. It was so fun I want to do it again it. My team’s trebuchet was six feet high and threw a 3 pound weight about 40 feet. The counter weigh was about 50 pounds made of a concrete filled bucket. Building it helped me understand how engineers work. It inspired me to become an engineer.

Record Launch
A Professor of mechanical engineering at Weber State University wrote and article about trebuchets and a competition every fall semester among the freshman engineers. The article was Really Throwing It, a model of a medieval weapon sets a school record.
How much do students know about trebuchets? They learn how to design basic structures, how the mass of the counterweight and the length of the throwing arm affect the velocity and range of the projectile, and physics of projectile motion. They also learn history. King Edward I sieged Sterling Castle in1304. It also was used in biological warfare. Carolstein in 1422 dead bodies and manure were flung into the city to spread disease.
How far do they shoot? In the competition at Weber State the trebuchets are two feet tall and fire a base ball. Usually they only shoot from forty to one hundred feet. But fall semester of 2004 a team of freshmen engineers made a trebuchet that fired one hundred eighty- four feet!
I went to and engineering camp last summer, JEMS. We made trebuchets Ours were about six feet high and our counter weight was about fifty lbs imagine if we put 100 lbs on the trebuchet instead. Although it would have broken because we bent the first axis we had the first try and we had to get a new axis pipe. We constructed a miniature wall and tried to demolish it. There were points for hitting it and knocking part over and there were also lots of points for damaging the wall. We only got to about forty feet.

Time Turns Back To When Pigs Flew

When asking someone to do something for you and they say "When pigs fly," you can safely say that day is today. Trebuchets make this happen. Today's fascination with trebuchets is ever growing. "Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers and Scaring the Sheep" an article written by Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal, fully accounts how this is possible. The article has illustrated how the human's interest in history mixed with his creative thinking and his sense of entertainment will let humans change impossibility to possibility. But why would you build a trebuchet? Hew Kennedy, who lives 140 miles northwest of London, is an inventor and military historian. Mr. Kennedy built a full sized trebuchet replica that is four stories tall and weighs 30 tons. In the article an interview with Mr. Kennedy reveals Kennedy had built it mainly for "bloody good fun." He also expresses the last few attempts to build a trebuchet in history failed or were insufficient. In the summer of Last year I took an engineering course at the University of Idaho and built a trebuchet with a team of other students. We were learning about engineering and all the while having a blast making trebuchets. Building a trebuchet is really fun and it can also be really educational. How would you build it? To build a trebuchet you need to know physics and a lot of math. You need to know what materials to build what parts out of so that when you try firing it the trebuchet won't snap in half. There are four basic parts: the frame, the lever arm, the counter weight, and the sling. The sling is simple it is some sort of rope tied to the long end of the lever arm with a pouch in middle then a loop on the other end to again attach to the long end of the lever arm but is free to fly off at a given moment. The counter weight is basically a box with weight in it that can hinge around the short end of the lever arm. Or you could attach a fixed weight to the lever arm. The lever arm is basically a long pole attached to the frame with an axle about two thirds down one end of the arm. The frame is usually made of a base and two A-frame supports for the lever arm. I learned all this at the University of Idaho. Mr. Kennedy researched and made models before building his trebuchet. He now uses it for public amusement. I think that is a great idea I would pay to see pigs fly among other things. History is always making a comeback and filtering into today's world.

Responce Paper To "The Art of the Catapult" by William Gurstelle

Below is a paper I wrote after reading this book

Researching the History of Catapults
	When searching for the history of something, it is always cheap and easy to just surf the internet. But how reliable is the internet? Surely there have been countless high school students and college students, who were required to post websites on the same topic for which you are searching. They aren�t experts on the subject and have only done enough research to get a good grade in class. A much more reliable source for information would be a book. I have found that �The Art of the Catapult� by William Gurstelle is an excellent book to find out about the history of catapults.
	He fully describes the evolution of catapults, famous battles in which they were used, instructions to build your own models of the weapons, and a bit of the science behind ancient warfare. This book was perfect for my interest in the origins of the trebuchet. It didn�t just say that the trebuchet was invented here, used for this and then went out of fashion when cannons were made. This book described the weapons used before it, who used these weapons, and why they used them. 
In this book I like how the first chapter is about safety when building the weapons. On the internet, it is possible to find actual instructions but the safety warning is weak and only states basically, �be careful and have an adult with you.� I have been researching how to build catapults and trebuchets on the internet and no website was as concerned about safety as the author of this book. �Most of the projects and plans are safe for children�.you should be aware that each city, town, or municipality has its own rules and regulations, some of which may apply to a few of the projects described in this book.�(pg 1) I have never found any warnings about violating regulations of the town in which you are making something, on the internet. I am impressed with the warning in the book.
 My brother used to have a potato gun that we could shoot potatoes across the river with. None of my family ever thought that there could have been regulations against it. I still don�t know but now I am curious if there are any. This sort of warning in a book will make me wonder about it in the future with whatever I am building.
The instructions are in a logical order, also they are place in the book as Gurstelle goes down the time line of catapult history. It illustrates how simple the weapons were in the beginning; to more complex yet still simple ideas for the evolution of the catapults. The section for the instructions usually holds a little history of that particular model of catapult. There is always paragraph or two about safety for that particular model also.
Gurstelle not only tells you the history of the catapults, but he also describes the more advanced models, and the different types of catapults, he describes the famous people who used them. 400 B.C. Dionysius, the Elder, took advantage of the siege engines and used them to lay siege on a town called Motya near Sicily. Alexander the Great was also one of the first to use siege engines for conquering vast territories. Gurstelle describes Alexander�s siege of Tyre. He doesn�t always focus on the parts where the catapults play, which makes it an interesting story instead of only writing a short version that focuses completely on one subject the whole time. He said that Alexander would catapult barrels of poisonous snakes and hornet�s nests on to defending ships instead of only firing rock projectiles. 
 When I went to J.E.M.S. and built a trebuchet, the day of graduation we fired ripe cantaloupe and various other fruits after our competition. For the competition, we fired three pound Yoga weight balls. It was fun to see the destruction of a good sized cantaloupe spat on the ground as I am sure it was fun for Alexander to see Tyrianian sailors jump off of their ship on order to get away from a barrel of agitated venomous snakes. 
Gurstelle described other famous sieges such as the siege of Acre and the crusades of the Christian Europeans against the Eastern Muslims. The Muslims used trebuchets to fire barrels of advanced chemical mixtures at the siege towers of the Christians. 
Gurstelle didn�t fully describe the travel of the trebuchet invention from China to the Middle East but not many sources really have that information anyway. �In 1304, possibly the largest concentration of big trebuchet- type catapults ever seen in one place was assembled on the plains before the walls of Stirling Castle in Scotland.�(pg 138) I saw a show on the Discovery Channel about a Scottish siege. NOVA was trying to find out if a trebuchet was use in that siege. They built two full sized trebuchets and tested them on a makeshift castle wall. It was interesting watching them build the trebuchets because they built them as the Scottish would have without machines or chain saws. 
I built my own model trebuchet out of trim for my research project. I had a lot of fun making it. It took a long time though and it was only a small model. Even with instructions I had trouble making my model work perfectly. I wonder how NOVA got theirs to work so effectively in such a short amount of time.
�The Art of the Catapult� is a wonderful book to investigate the history of the catapult and the many designs it inspired such as the Trebuchet, Ballistae, and Onager. I feel it is a lot more reliable than the internet. Even though it is a little more expensive and more time consuming to find than going to some search site in the internet and typing in a few key words. A book contains more information and the author is more passionate about what is being written that someone making a website to gain a grade.

Link to Research I have conducted

Back to Main Page